“Anarchy in the streets”: anarchism, public order and social housing in Portugal (1900-1940)

ABSTRACT

In this article we aim to contribute to the history of contemporary State by bringing into the picture what often falls outside its domain, defies its logic and is built against it. For that purpose, we look at the history of anarchism in Portugal, dominant among the Portuguese working classes during the first decades of the 20th century, and suggest that the threat that anarchism posed to the affirmation of modern State powers contributed to the urban planning and social housing projects developed by private and public institutions. In other words, and despite anarchism being an anti-statist political culture, in this article we are interested in the conflicting but mutually constitutive relationship between anarchism and the State. Our main focus is on the disciplinary and moral dimensions of the social housing projects developed throughout a historical period that encompasses different political regimes (Monarchy, Republic and a Fascist dictatorship). As we argue, those projects had amongst their purposes the destruction of the “collectivist tendencies,” class struggle and the overcoming of the nefarious and unpredictable effects that industrialisation had brought.

KEYWORDS:

• Anarchism
• public order
• social housing
• State history
• Portugal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Some exceptions are worth mentioning. For instance, Richard Bach Jensen and his work on how the international threat of anarchist terrorism encouraged police cooperation worldwide and led to the modernisation of police practices (Jensen 2013). Particularly important for this article is the book by Chris Ealham about Barcelona, Anarchism and the City (Ealham 2010).

2. The thesis was published in Portuguese in 1992 and a shorter version in English was published in 2001.

3. The alleging of similarities between anarchist and millenarian movements, used to assert the spontaneous, primitive or pre-modern character of anarchism, has a long history that can traced back to authors such as Moral, ([1929] 1979 and Borkenau, (([1937] 1963. But its popularity is mostly due to the historians Gerald Brenan, Raymond Carr, James Joll and, especially, Eric Hobsbawm through his book Primitive Rebels (1983 [Hobsbawm 1959]). One of the more consistent critiques to that association came from a North American anthropologist, Jerome Mintz, who spent a long period of field research in Casas Viejas, Andalusia, precisely one of the villages that Hobsbawm used as an example as a consequence of the insurrection that happened there in 1933. Mintz considered that Hobsbawm’s account was based “primarily on a preconceived evolutionary model of political development rather than on data gathered in field research” (Mintz [1982] 2004, 271; also; Kaplan 1977).

4. The “anti-anarchist law,” approved in February 6, 1896, was one of the most severe laws created with the same purpose in Europe. Its seven articles ruled six months long correctional prison sentences, followed by deportation to the Portuguese colonies for an indefinite time, for all the people who “profess anarchist doctrines” and “defend, applaud, suggest or provoke – even if the provocation doesn’t have any effect – subversive acts against the social order, people and property.” The press was also forbidden from “dealing with anarchist deeds or attempts” as well as “giving notice of police investigations and diligences or of the debates that happen during trials of cases against anarchists.” The accused were to be judged without a jury, could be arrested without trial and the law had retroactive effects.

5. As the historian António Ventura argued, the anarchists intervention in workers’ unions was relatively precocious in Portugal by comparison with what happened in other countries (cf. Ventura 2000, 86).

6. See the amazing work of Eduardo Cintra Torres about the strike (Torres 2018).

7. The Confederação Geral do Trabalho will be created in ([1943] 1990, following the União Operária Nacional, created in 1914, both dominated by the anarcho-syndicalists. Until the 1930s, CGT will be the main workers organization in Portugal.

8. It is worth mentioning that, in 1919, the Portuguese Communist Party did not yet exist, Marxist ideas were residual – mostly present among the socialist reformists – and that the workers’ movement was mainly libertarian, viewing the Russian Revolution and its developments with a growing scepticism. The fear the Revolution caused among the national political elites, though, and the fact that communism was invoked by communists and anarchists alike (in the libertarians case, an anti-authoritarian communism), led to the permanent confusion between the libertarians’ objectives and the Soviet reality. In the following years, the “Bolshevik” epithet became the standard and “official” way to designate all socialist revolutionaries.

9. As Candeias stresses, the count is far from exhaustive. It should also be underlined that not all the schools were anarchist; nonetheless, the great majority was created by unions that were affiliated with the anarcho-syndicalist General Confederation of Labour.

10. About Lisbon, Carlos Nunes da Silva wrote that until the arrival of the Dictatorship the core-principle was to “put in the hands of private initiative all the urban tasks and management, due to the short budgets and the option for a ‘liberal’ political model” (as quoted in Baptista 1999, 29).

11. “Ilhas” (or islands) were the most common kind of working-class housing in Oporto. Built in the back of previously existing buildings, “Ilhas” were slums usually composed of two rows of small houses with only one window each, no sewage and with shared toilets.

12. Such as selectively firing the “agitators that poisoned the orderly and working masses” (as quoted in Morais 2008, 54), arranging with the authorities the placement of strong contingents of military and police forces (e.g. 1911, 1919 and 1943 strikes) or even lock-outs (e.g. 1911 strike).

13. Which was nonetheless fundamental: during the 1930s (with a threatening civil war happening in Spain in 1936–1939), were arrested more than 10,000 political prisoners (57% of them were workers [cf. Rosas 2012, 296]) and in 1936 a concentration camp for political prisoners was inaugurated in Tarrafal, Cape Verde.

14. Until the Carnation Revolution, in 25 April of 1974, when democracy was restored, the Estado Novo built approximately 16 000 houses (cf. Silva and Ramos 2015, 257).

15. In article 11 of the 1933 Constitution, which established the fundamentals of the Estado Novo, family was presented as a “source of conservation and development of the race, as a primary base for education, discipline and social harmony and as a foundation for all political order”